These `Pajama Men' are full of eyes-wide-open hilarity

Chris Jones, Tribune arts criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

You can see why Chicago's venerable Second City plucked Shenoah Allen and Marc Chavez -- a.k.a. "The Pajama Men" -- out of the comedic desert known as Albuquerque and brought them here to the city that gave birth to improvisational comedy.

These two humble but immensely talented dudes belong in Chicago, the mother town. And, in time, they'll surely attract attention from the scouts that jet here from the coasts and lure away our best people for more lucrative, and usually more facile, things.

Whip-smart and able to turn on the thinnest of dimes, Allen and Chavez are improvisers' improvisers. Actors' actors. Comedians' comedians. Insiders in the sketch-comedy world love it when performers can fully physicalize their characters, because most comics cannot. Similarly, honchos in the biz get mightily sick of seeing wannabes doing the same old gags about Dick Cheney or the usual shtick involving date-night in the sports bar. When someone can do material that's utterly removed from the popular zeitgeist, this is refreshing.

Allen and Chavez use no props, need no light cues or recorded sound of any kind and still turn in a show demonstrably unlike anything you've ever seen. But there's a catch to all that good news. When it comes to creating a show for the kind of general audience that will have to pay their future bills -- indirectly, at least -- this pair still has a lot of work to do.

Most important of all, "The Pajama Men" has to lose that slightly geeky quality that reveals the duo's origins on the fringe circuit, where Canadian nerds make up a good portion of the audience.

Granted, nerd-oriented shows like "One Man Lord of the Rings" can be hits. But that one had a brand name. Allen and Chavez have to make it on their own. And for a start, that will involve explaining why they perform their entire act wearing pajamas.

Nightclothes aside, this is not an easy show to describe -- and too much explication of the scenes would spoil the fun. In essence, the pair creates interlocking two-character scenes -- with recurring creations -- that are structured in a cinematic fashion, allowing the pair to switch character and position every few seconds. It has the flavor of a live movie sequence. Some of the settings are historical -- albeit with a contemporary satirical sting. Many take place in a weird, haunted hotel.

The material has at least one foot in the fantastical world -- if you like elaborate video games or fantasy-epic movies, this will totally be your thing. There aren't any coconuts or knights in shining armor (not really, anyway), but there are twirling mustaches and men named Nigel. So you call it Pythonesque.

Both these young performers have copious amounts of talent. But Allen, in particular, has a dazzling physical dexterity. With a rubber face and hundreds of voices, he at times puts you in mind of an impoverished Jim Carrey.

What the show now needs is a better contextualization of its own silliness and far more direct involvement with the audience. Much of the early material reads as clever but too cold and weird -- and it's only when Allen finally engages his viewers in a solo sequence late in the hour that people really relax enough to get into the groove. The material in the show is poorly arranged -- the stronger, warmer material needs to happen earlier. And the duo also needs to stick at least a toe back in a world in which their audience actually lives.

It's fine to offer ghosts and horses -- very funny ghosts and horses, at that -- but that kind of stuff needs balancing with more sophisticated, urbane fare. You wouldn't want to spend your whole lives on the fringe circuit, fun as that may be, now would you, gentlemen?